Cut costs. Improve compliance. Increase reliability, consistency and security. Discover more about the advantages of outsourcing your international payroll!
1. Improve compliance
There’s a school of thought that says an outsourced international payroll solution can never truly offer the right solution, because there’s such a great difference between HR, tax and data compliance standards around the world.
Run your international payroll from London, the argument goes, and you’ll miss the crucial differences that influence operations in each of your territories, because payroll is a very different beast in London when compared with Lisbon, Lahore or Lima.
But this misses the point of a well-run international payroll. International payroll combines the best of local and global. Local understanding that uses local knowledge and expertise is essential to a successful operation. But the global is just as important because no country exists in isolation from any other. If you’re sharing employee data, for example, it’s vital that it meets the compliance standards not just of its ‘home’ country, but that of the country in which it will be processed.
It’s in combining local and international expertise that outsourcing international payroll can pay dividends, making sure there are no ‘compliance cracks’ between international boundaries down which your organisation can fall.
2. Increase reliability
Accuracy is one of the common reasons any organisation outsources its payroll. The combination of specific expertise, the latest software and the fact that an outsourced payroll provider focuses purely on payroll, rather than the 101 different tasks an in-house team typically needs to juggle, can all aid accuracy. That’s doubly the case for international payroll, where it’s not only easier for errors to creep in, but harder to trace those errors back to source.
It’s also the case that not every territory that you operate is likely to operate the same size of HR or payroll team. In some countries, the team may be just a handful of people at most. Outsourcing international payroll gives operations in every country greater resilience and better ability to withstand the effects of sickness and staff churn.
3. Improve consistency
There will always be some differences in the way your local payrolls operate. Some countries operate a lunar month pay tradition. Some bonus or holiday payments are virtually hard-wired into a country’s culture.
An outsourced international payroll service can cope comfortably with these while ensuring the elements that should be common and consistent across your global operation are. That consistency matters because it ensures equity across the organisation and helps control costs (see below).
4. Boost security
Global growth brings challenges. One of the greatest is the security of personal data and the vulnerability of your network to cyber-attack. That vulnerability is dramatically increased when you operate a different system in each county.
Operating a common system across your international payroll ensures there’s one system to protect, and fewer vulnerabilities in the interfaces between systems.
5. Increase visibility
There are insights in your payroll data. Leveraging it can help you understand the relative cost between territories. It can reveal hidden costs. It can highlight inconsistencies. Yet that can only happen when you are able to compare like with like – and that can only happen when your organisation operates a single international payroll.
6. Control costs
Cost savings come from multiple sources when you outsource your international payroll. Outsourcing is invariably cheaper than running a discrete payroll across each of the countries in which you operate. You don’t have the cost of finding, training and replacing payroll staff. You don’t have multiple software licenses to pay for. You don’t risk fines for non-compliance or errors. And you can use the global view of your payroll to find further efficiencies.
Make international work
The benefits far outweigh the challenges of global payroll, don’t you think?
Find out more about our international payroll services. Then, to explore just what the advantages of outsourcing international payroll could mean for your organisation, talk to us!
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A Simple Guide to Outsourcing Your International Payroll
How do businesses successfully manage international payroll? Our guide covers everything you need to know about international payroll outsourcing.
